Category: Life

I have a bit of an obsession with eBay, as Heather can attest after staying with me last week. I checked my eBay sales more frequently than I checked my e-mail.

Watching the auctions and checking to see if I was paid are the fun parts. Listing items is incredibly painful. Dad had 55 comics, and because I am not a collector, I really don’t know how to determine if an item is Fine or Excellent or Poor. So I took at least three incredibly high resolution photos of each comic and dictate a detailed listing of every single scuff and crease I can see.

After the first few individual listings, I decided it would be easier to post the comics in bundles. That saved me time on mucking with the eBay interface, but I still had to go through the painful process of describing them all, the HTML formatting was no less burdensome, and–to top it all off–the bundles tended to sell for less than the individual comics I posted.

So I created an Excel spreadsheet that automated the HTML formatting and made listing an item on eBay take no more than 30 seconds instead of 15 or more minutes. The only painful bit left was the process of describing them all.

I don’t know how many hours it took me–I would guess it was in excess of 60 hours total over the last month–but I listed the last comic this evening. The auctions are staggered to start over the next two weeks, and the whole lot should be sold by 15-DEC-2006.

I doubt the money I will get on eBay for these comics will properly compensate me for the time I spent posting them, but it’s a relief to have the painful part of the process completed. Now, it’s just the fun…

This morning, I can see the snow-capped Olympic Mountains clearly from the windows of Bauhaus coffee shop just a few blocks from my apartment. There’s barely a cloud in the pale blue sky.

The weather today is not, however, representative of the past 15 days. According to the local papers, this is the wettest November in recorded Seattle history, and we only need four more inches in the next 15 days to reach the record in December 1993 (11.64 inches currently, 15.33 is the record). With another major storm due to roll in this Sunday, the chances seem good.

Last night, I experienced the worst traffic I have ever seen, all due to the storm–the 520 bridge, a floating bridge, was almost closed due to the waves crashing over the four-lane span. I left the office at around 6 p.m. only to watch an express bus take ten minutes to move 30 feet along the on ramp to 520. I turned around and went back to the office. I left again at 7:30 p.m. with Jay, my boss, and he drove along a series of backroads that parallel 520 until the last stretch before the bridge.

I think Seattle may be perfectly representative of the problems faced by America: we can not adjust to changing circumstances. Like Los Angeles, there is no more room to build more freeway lanes. Unlike Los Angeles, however, Seattle can not swallow the concept. Where Los Angeles has stopped expanding freeways, instead making huge investments to build rail lines in highway medians and create effective HOV lanes, Seattle can not accept that traffic patterns can no longer be improved. Rail is considered a waste of money, and no one has the political will to make traffic worse solely to improve the effectiveness of HOV lanes.

Seattle must be broken of its addiction to single-passenger cars, but how much worse will the traffic have to be for Seattle to admit it has a problem?

If I stay here for the rest of my life, I don’t see how I can not get involved in local politics.

It still doesn’t exorcise my guilt over not voting in 1994. Not after volunteering 80 hours per work for Del Vecchio for Congress in 1996, not after contributing and voting for decade following.

But we finally hit the Republicans.

I have recently been unable to resist my old
Civilization III addiction–I’ve played the past few weekends. But this
morning, I finally took a scissors and destroyed the CD. No more Civ
for me.

I’ve been spending an insane amount of time on eBay recently (my name there is
mao.public), posting my dad’s comic book collection from the 1940s. We all thought this would be a great way of liquidating his various collections, except for the stamp collection which was simply too large. I’m beginning to think that the comic book collection, at only 55 items, is too large, too. I literally spent all day yesterday–from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m.–photographing the comics, uploading them to the Web, detailing the condition of each comic, creating the listing… it took forever, even after I decided to sell them in lots rather than individually. I don’t think the money will be worth the effort I put into it.

But I’ve already sold a couple of coins, and I’m enjoying experiencing a part of the Web–eBay–that I’ve barely even logged on to in the past.

I think Jim got a kick out of the comic book collection as well. There were some names on the comics, like Doris White and the Phelps’, that I don’t think Jim had thought about in 40 or more years. But even after 60 years, he was still able to remember in which units in Greenbelt they lived.

Recently, I wrote about how we had packed P******’s office with chairs as a practical joke.

So, our entire group was also about to undergo an office shuffle (it was supposed to happen today, actually, but it got canceled). But before P******* even got back from his business trip, he was moved out of his chair-infested office to a new one.  And the movers left all the chairs in the old office.

*sigh*

I can’t help but mention another bit of Microsoft culture shock. Of course, it’s less shock now, more amusement.

When Brian (from Oracle) went on his honeymoon in Honduras over a year ago, Kevin had the brilliant idea of doing… something… to Brian’s office when he was gone. Kevin’s inspiration: a practical joke pulled at his prior employer, PeopleSoft, where the floor of a golf lover’s office was lovingly covered with sod. We never got much further than ideas, though, but the thought was there.

At Microsoft, it’s all about execution. P——-, my boss’s boss, regularly works from home and anyone who would like borrow his office when he’s out may do so. Last week, someone adjusted his chair. P——- was not pleased, and left this note on his white-board.

I’m not too sure who started it–I remember being confused on Tuesday seeing P——-‘s chair sitting on top of his desk. But by Friday morning, every conference room in our building had been raided (just one chair per conf room), and his office looked like this:

The Microsoft company meeting was held this past Thursday, 21-SEP-06. At Safeco Field. For those of you who are not familiar with baseball, Safeco Field is the home stadium for the Seattle Mariners. In other words, it probably holds 40-50,000 people. Now, we didn’t take up the entire stadium. A lot of longtime employees pass on attending the company meeting because they’ve seen it before and have too much work to do. But it’s strongly recommended that you attend your first year at Microsoft, and as you can see from the photo above right, a lot of people did show up.

Something was conspicuously absent at the company meeting, however. No, it wasn’t Bill Gates (that’s him on the big screen in the photo to the right). Even though he is retiring in a year or so, he gave a keynote covering some of the fascinating things that Microsoft Research is working on.

What was missing were laptop computers, which to me seem surgically attached to the vast majority of Microsoft employees. For example, at the first Visual Basic product team meeting I attended, only two people out of a dozen had not brought their laptops. I was one of the two people.

What made Microsoft employees leave their laptops at home was security: when Bill and Steve are around, it means no laptops, no cameras, and no bags.

[I actually wanted to bring my laptop. I was behind on my marketing plan, and the first draft was due to my boss the next day.]

Most of the company meeting was just a dog and pony show. Mind you, the dogs and ponies were bloody impressive–we got to see the best Microsoft has to offer–but there was still a big focus on features rather than benefits.

The thing that really surprised me, though, was that my cynicism was beaten down, at least for long enough that I drank some of the Kool-Aid being served. Part of it was just being a part of it. 20,000 people were in Safeco Field with me, all Microsoft employees just like me.

The other part of it was realizing that, as a user-focused company (as opposed to a datacenter-focused company like Oracle), Microsoft was changing parts of the world (albeit small parts). There was this incredibly sappy promotional video shown during the first keynote about a school in rural China to which Microsoft had donated computers and software. Watching it felt like reading George Antonious’ The Arab Awakening (published 1939), a deeply biased work of Arab nationalism that is nonetheless profoundly persuasive and managed to push my college self down the road of caring deeply about the Middle East–in spite of my general skepticism and resistance to manipulation. In other words, I knew I was being manipulated by this video, but I couldn’t help but be touched. The video included a high school girl who was brought to tears when trying to explain how much Microsoft’s contribution to her school meant to her and her future. Of course, this is a company with a ridiculous amount of money, so they couldn’t just leave it at that. After the video, they brought the school superintendent, the student and her mother up on stage. Microsoft had flown them in just for this event.

I was in a baseball stadium, and I could just imagine the hawker walking down the aisle, calling out "Kool-Aid, get your Kool-Aid!" I raised my hand to this imaginary vendor, passed him a few bucks, and happily drank my Kool-Aid down.

Apparently, I live in a hotel. This is according to Finn and Ellie, who don’t know anyone who lives in a multi-story, multi-unit building. I tried to explain that I live in an apartment building, and I thought the message got through.

Until the next morning, when Finn asked if the restaurant in my hotel serves Froot Loops.

Almost all of my close marketing friends at Oracle are pregnant: Kevin, Mike, Nelly, Brigitte and Brian are all expecting in the next couple of weeks/months. Well, Kevin, Nelly, Brigitte and Mike are expecting soon.

Madison Louise D***** was born yesterday at 3:42 pm to Brian and Julie.

Yeah!